If there is ever going to be a cultural shift in this direction, now would be a logical time for it to happen. Boomers have had a disproportionate impact on the American zeitgeist at every phase of their lives. They are now getting to the age where their primary concern is likely to be their own mortality. Based on the way the Boomer generation is often portrayed as demanding a high quality of life for themselves, it seems possible that they will try to re-prioritize society to prevent their own deaths. I still don't take the idea seriously that this will happen but it's a point in favor of it.
Does the fact that 15% of cats had antibodies suggest that far more Wuhan residents were infected than the official totals? Officially I think only around 1 in 200 Wuhan residents were infected. It says that the cats were sampled from animal shelters or pet hospitals so maybe the workers there had to keep coming in every day to care for the animals even during lockdown and thus were more at risk.
My dad is an election law professor and he's been talking nonstop about this for weeks... this is his article on it
Both good points. Hopefully we get more tests of the sort reported soon.
The pool of people who 1. received a test while asymptomatic 2. tested positive and 3. are updating the public about their condition through mass media seems very small to me. The fact that two of them are turning out to remain fully asymptomatic seems to indicate that this is in fact likely to be a common thing. Somewhat surprising imo.
We're finally getting some results on this. An antibody test in an Italian town an hour outside Milan has been done. 2000 people out of a population of 6169 have been tested.
Results: 13-14% of the population tested positive for the antibodies (~832 people).
The town had 27 confirmed cases, with 4 confirmed deaths. 6 deaths of all causes were recorded in March.
So this is arguably good news. It implies an IFR of about .5%. If the population here is older/unhealthier than average, as seems to be true for Northern Italy as a whole, then we could see that number dipping down further. Covid being less than an order of magnitude worse than the flu is starting to look likely but there is still a long way to go to reach herd immunity and I personally think that they should at least try for actual suppression unless we get really good numbers on the death rate and are more confident that survivors won't have lasting side effects.
Ok, I will do it when I get a chance. If anyone knows any strategies for maximizing engagement on Reddit let me know so I can get a good sample size.
It might be a good idea to do a survey on /r/COVID19positive and ask people about symptoms in themselves vs their family members. If the correlation is strong enough that we need to worry about it we should be able to reveal it given enough data.
Possible list of questions:
Anyone have any more suggestions?
We need a new model I think. The purpose of the IHME was to figure out how to allocate hospital resources at the peak. Now we are roughly at or past the peak and we need to figure out how to re-open and what calculated risks are worth taking to ensure that businesses don't get devastated even more. Hopefully someone is working on it.